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I wake up in my prison cell for the very last time. Today is the last day I will ever be locked up or restrained or told when it’s okay to eat or when it’s okay to take a shower. Today is the last day and I feel hopeful.

I wake up early and trudge down to the dining hall in a straight line behind killers and child abusers, thieves and drug addicts like me. I walk in the line with mothers who miss their children, wives, and daughters. I walk to the dining hall and eat the very last meal I will ever have behind bars. It tastes like shit, but I happily eat every bite. It is the last meal I will ever have in prison.

My parents, though they are divorced, wait to pick me up outside of the prison gates. I walk out of the building and down the meager sidewalk to a towering metal fence with a gate that rolls open and closed. Today, it opens for me. It opens for me and I hurry through.

I sit in the back of the same white pickup that my dad has had since I was twenty years old. I sit in the backseat with my face in my hands and I cry. The tears flood down my pale cheeks leaving streaks of redness in their wake. The tears come for all the pain I have endured, the tears come for all the mistakes I’ve made. The tears come for the hope of a better life ahead. I sit in the back of my dad’s pickup and I cry. Today I am free.

I haven’t written anything in quite a while because I’ve been stifled. I’ve been stifled by the assholes of the world, including myself, and have retreated into a dark hole that sucks the creativity out of me with a force that knocks me off of my feet.

I am clawing my way out of this hole, making small progress each day until the time comes when I won’t feel its sharp nails sinking into the flesh of my mind. Maybe that day will come soon. I can only hope that it does.

I’ve been thinking about how to hold onto my creative voice a lot lately, and this is what I’ve come up with:

People are dicks. People judge, people lurk in the figurative shadows waiting to find that one piece of information to throw in your face. People fucking suck, but how does one rise above it? How do you continue to write/create without fear of being judged by others?

The time has come in my life to do what makes me happy. I have to take a step back sometimes and look at my existence from the outside to know that it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. People will always judge me for what I write, how I write it, and I can’t change that. I can only love myself, live my life, and strive each day to give zero fucks.

Follow me, friends.

I honestly don’t think there’s anyone out there who truly believes in me, except for myself, of course. My fiancé has brought up the fact that I may never sell one copy of any of my books (already sold two, bitch). He supports my writing, but has no confidence that I will be able to make a living doing it.

There are times when his lack of faith in me makes me feel like shit. I mean, he is the person I plan on marrying one day, and if anyone in the entire world believed in me, you’d think it would be him.

I try to shake his negativity off. I try to work as hard as I can. I try to write the best chapters of my life in the hopes that I will be able to prove all the non-believers wrong. I will make a living writing, or I’ll die trying.

I’m sure this is an issue for many of you who are pursuing your dreams, and so I look around at the successful people in the world and remember that there were people who didn’t believe in them either.

Follow me, friends.

The Top 5 Worst Aspects of Working from Home

5. Motivation

It can be quite difficult to motivate yourself to be productive when you work from home. There are no supervisors breathing down your neck, just you and your own determination, which can be hard to muster up from time to time.

4. Procrastination

Not only is procrastination my middle name, but it’s also a huge problem for me in my work from home projects. I put my important tasks off so that I can do the ones I enjoy. Then I put them off a bit more. And those tasks that I really don’t want to do? They never get done.

3. Distraction

I have two weird little dogs and a fiancé that provide plenty of distractions for me during my “work” day. There are times that I welcome the distractions, but there are others when they can be extremely frustrating. From movies playing on our bedroom television to the maintenance man knocking on our door, working from home means you will never be free from all outside interferences.

2. Less Respect for your Designated Work Time

This is a HUGE one for me, as even when I tell my family that I’m working, I still receive phone calls, texts, emails, etc. When I worked for someone else, they knew not to contact me. However, working from home seems to make them think that I’m available all the time.

1. Pay Cut

I make a lot less money working from home than I did at my traditional jobs. For me, I still prefer to work from home as it gives me a sense of independence, and allows me to control my anxiety in ways that I could not when I worked for someone else.

For me, there are still a ton of positive aspects that outweigh the negatives mentioned above, but if you’re thinking of getting into a work from home situation, it wouldn’t hurt to keep this list in mind.

I went to bed early last night like the old woman of 35 that I am. I dreamt of my old job again, and of pleading with my boss to let me come back. Clearly I have unresolved issues because I have this dream rather frequently.

I quit my job two months ago or so, and I’ve been a wreck ever since. I struggle to find ways to make money, but I am spurred on by the hope that I can do something for myself that truly fulfills me.

This morning, upon waking up, I checked my site to see that I SOLD A BOOK. It’s a coloring book for adults that I created in a rather barbaric way, using MS Word and my brain’s expansive index of bad words. I sold one copy and I am on top of the world.

I choose to see my meager $1.07 royalty as a sign that I am finally on the right path in life. I choose to view that one sale as affirmation that sometimes it’s okay to step out onto the metaphorical ledge in life and see what happens.

In spite of all these bad dreams and all of the mistakes I’ve made that still follow me around, today I am hopeful for something better.